Let the bidding begin. The Rocketboom auction for one week’s advertising is up and running on eBay.

After just one hour last night the auction already had 16 bids, with the highest offer $2,000. There are 9 days and 11 hours left.

How much will it go for? $20,000? $40,000? $60,000? More? Place your bets. And take a good look at those terms and conditions:

For the highest bidder, we will create five original, fifteen second (minimum) – one minute (maximum) post-roll commercials that will span five days of programming, Monday-Friday, March 6 through March 10, 2006. Each day that week a different commercial that we create for your company will be played at the conclusion of the Rocketboom episode.

[...]The five unique advertisements, along with hyperlinks to your website, will also become a part of our archived web pages. They will remain freely available, searchable, index-able, re-distributable, and on demand. Additionally, direct links to each commercial will be available for at least one year.

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A wonderfully caustic review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review. For the full story click here. For the highlights see below:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years…

[...]there’s nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You’ve lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don’t own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There’s no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

[...]Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like “as always in America.” Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions. He has a brief encounter with a young man outside of Montgomery, Ala. (“I listen to him tell me, as if he were justifying himself, about his attachment to this region”), and suddenly sees that the young man has “all the reflexes of Southern culture” and the “studied nonchalance . . . so characteristic of the region.” With his X-ray vision, Lévy is able to reach tall conclusions with a single bound.

And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox – America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans’ party loyalty is “very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty.” Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. The partner-swapping club is both “libertine” and “conventional,” “depraved” and “proper.” And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lévy’s tedious and original thinking: “A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high – extremely high – symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one.” And what’s with the flurries of rhetorical questions? Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? “What is a Republican? What distinguishes a Republican in the America of today from a Democrat?” Lévy writes, like a student padding out a term paper. “What does this experience tell us?” he writes about the Mall of America. “What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?” And what is one to make of the series of questions – 20 in a row – about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. “I still don’t think there’s reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . . no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity – increasingly less metaphorical – of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can’t manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model.”

Thanks, pal. I don’t imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

My Blogarithms story for Metro this week is about the New York videoblog Rocketboom. And it comes with a little EiNY exclusive.

Over the past few months there’s been some speculation about the value of an advertising slot at the end of a Rocketboom segment. Jeff Jarvis was quoted in the New York Times (Times Select) in December as saying that based on 100,000 downloads a day one advert could cost $8,000.

Well, that was almost two months ago. Rocketboom now gets 130,000 downloads a day. And producer Andrew Baron and presenter Amanda Congdon are about to find out how much that’s worth. Next week they will auction off Rocketboom’s first week of advertising on eBay.

What makes this auction even more interesting is that the winning bidder will have to relinquish control of the advertising to Baron and Congdon who are going to make the adverts themselves. If a company insists on making its own advert, then Congdon and Baron will vet it (and exercise a veto) before it runs. And this policy will apply to all future adverts on Rocketboom.

(Via Adrants) UPDATE: Baron clarifies writing us, “The advertiser will relinquish all control. If we get a high bidder, they will pay us right away. Then we will make the ads and play them on Rocketboom whether they like the ads or not. They will understand that by placing a bid, they give up complete control to us to do what we will.”

I’ll leave it to the advertising experts to make of the policy what they will. But if Rocketboom’s ads are as good as the show, you can almost guarantee a large slice of the audience will stick around to watch it.

Metro does not publish Blogarithm stories online but you can download a pdf of today’s newspaper here. Alternatively here’s a copy of the story in my clips archive. Below are a few of my favorite Rocketboom episodes of the past year.

Rocketboom links:
There’s this upbeat tribute to John Lennon on the 25th anniversary of his death.
Excerpts from an evening at the Gotham Comedy Club.
And the irrepressible Julio and Lupita.

UPDATE: The ad is up and running. See the latest post here.

For THE definitive Galloway roundup see the The Daily Ablution.

But first revel in the hatred and derision with which he was greeted as he exited the Celebrity Big Brother house (also courtesy of The Daily Ablution).

Hamas claims victory and upends Mideast politics (IHT)

The voters decide: Galloway is evicted from ‘Big Brother’ to face public ridicule (Independent).

Let the recriminations begin.

(Pic nicked from Simon’s Brain.)

Via Wellsy

Last Words, Galloway:

We all knew Galloway was a wanker before now anyway but by going onto Big Brother all he’s managed to do is simply broadcast this to a public who previously didn’t know who he was or thought he was that guy who told the American Senate a thing or two. Blognor Regis.

The maverick MP is also clearly feeling the stress of the situation although not showing it on the outside overtly. One senses that he is worried about his decision to go into the house and is worried how this latest setback is playing with the public. Island Monkey.

He hasn’t a clue how much this stunt has backfired and I have a feeling he is going to make an even bigger fool of himself when he gets outside and starts ranting about Big Brother’s censorship. Harry, Harry’s Place.

Always save the best until last. From today’s Guardian:

George Galloway faces the prospect of a criminal investigation into his activities by the serious fraud office, which has collected evidence relating to the oil-for-food corruption scandal in Iraq.

A four-strong SFO team returned from Washington with what a source close to US investigators calls “thousands of documents” about the scandal.

[...]The SFO is following up two official reports published before Christmas in Washington, which detailed banking evidence that Mr Galloway’s wife and his political campaign organisation both received large sums from Saddam Hussein, laundered through under-the-counter oil allocations.

Mr Galloway is unaware of the SFO’s activities. He is in the Channel 4 TV show Celebrity Big Brother and cut off from outside contact. He is expected to be evicted from the Big Brother house tonight.

[...]According to the US inquiries, big oil traders paid secret commissions in return for acquiring Iraqi shipments, which they frequently sold on to major US oil firms. The reports detail records of one alleged transaction in 2000 in which Taurus Petroleum gave $740,000 to Mr Galloway’s agent, the businessman Fawwaz Zureikat.

Mr Zureikat distributed the cash in several directions. He kept some himself, and passed some over as a kickback to Saddam’s regime.

He also gave $340,000 as a “donation” to Mr Galloway’s pro-Iraq campaign, the Mariam Appeal, and another $150,000 to a bank account in Jordan belonging to Mr Galloway’s wife. She in turn allegedly transferred $25,000 of that to her own account in London, though she denies the transaction. The Guardian tried to put the SFO allegations to Mr Galloway but Channel 4 refused to pass them on, saying: “We don’t pass anything into the house unless something horrible has happened.”

When the Volcker report came out Mr Galloway said: “How many times must I repeat this: I’ve never had a penny through oil deals and no one has produced a shred of evidence that I have … A lie doesn’t become a truth through repetition.”

Last night a spokesman for Mr Galloway said: “There is no crime to investigate. This is politically motivated, specious, frippery. It is a total waste of public money.”

Galloway: A total waste of public money.

UPDATE:
When Galloway met Saddam’s Son (via Pajamas Media)

Today could be Galloway’s final full day in the Big Brother house. He’s up for eviction tomorrow night. Conventional wisdom has it that he will be voted out and the bookies agree. Is this the end of all our fun? Or only the beginning?

The latest edition of Private Eye Magazine.

Update:

You float around promiscuously, stroking, metaphorically or literally, everybody’s ass so as to protect your own. We saw on the screen your real character portrayed for all to see. And that’s my last word.

Who could have said this? (Via A Long Wave Welcome.)

Clive Davis was in fine form yesterday.

On anti-Americanism:

And on publishing:

In my days as a gatekeeper, I spent about six months in a Bloomsbury office, goggling at the ineptitude of the stuff that came through the letter box, often with breathless recommendations from top-flight agents. One then-unpublished first novel — an historical tale about Garibaldi and the Risorgimento — had already been optioned by an extremely famous Hollywood producer. Apart from the inept prose and plotting, it seemed to me deeply unpromising that the author never seemed able to decide how to spell “Risorgimento.”

Read more here.